The Fat Man in History and Other Stories (27 page)
Read The Fat Man in History and Other Stories Online
Authors: Peter Carey
Tags: #Australia & New Zealand, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General, #Literary, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Short Stories, #History
I never liked Sergei. He never treated me with respect. He showed disdain.
I will donate him a briefcase. I have a beautiful one left me by the old general manager. It is slim and black with smart snappy little chrome clips on it. In it I place Sergei’s excellent references and about five hundred dollars worth of cash. It is a shame about the money, but no one must ever think him poor or helpless.
I order him to hold the briefcase. He looks so dapper. Who could not believe he was a senior executive? Who indeed!
It is time now for the little procession to the gate. The knowledge of what is happening hits Sergei on this, his walk to the scaffold. He handles it well enough, saying nothing I remember.
High on the wire the dead boy stands like a casualty of an awkward levitation trick.
I have the main gate opened and Sergei walks out of it. The guards stand dumbly like horses in a paddock swishing flies away. I am watching Bart’s eyes but they are clouded from me. He has become a foreign world veiled in mists. I know now that we will not discuss Dylan again or get stoned together. But he will do what I want because he knows I am crazy and cannot be deceived.
He seems to see nothing as the great wire mesh gate is rolled back into place and locked with chains. Sergei walks slowly down the gravel road away from us.
A grey figure slides out from the scrub a mile or so away. They will welcome him soon, this representative of management with his references in his briefcase.
The fact of Sergei’s execution could not possibly be nearly as elegant as my plan. I return to my office, leaving the grisly reality of it to the watchers at the gate.
In the night they put Sergei’s head on the wire. It stares towards my office in fear and horror, a reminder of my foolishness.
For now it appears that I misunderstood the situation. It appears that he was acting on Bart’s instructions, that the siphoned funds were being used to rebuild the inside of the factory.
To please me, dear god.
How could I have guarded against Bart’s “What if…” or protected us all from his laconic “easy-peasy”? If one lives with dreamers and encourages their aberrations something is bound to go wrong. Now I understand what it is to be the parent of brilliant children, children reared with no discipline, their every fantasy pandered to. Thus one creates one’s own assassins.
The factory tour is over now and Bart sits in my office eyeing me with the cunning of a dog, pretending servility, but with confused plans and strategies showing in his dog-wet eyes.
He understood nothing of factories nor my fear of them. His model factory is a nightmare far more obscene that anything my simple mind could have created.
For they have made a factory that is quiet. They have worried about aesthetics.
Areas of peaceful blue and whole fields of the most lyrical green. In these ideal conditions people perform insulting functions, successfully imitating the functions of mid-twentieth century machinery.
This is Bart and Sergei’s masterpiece, their gift to me. They have the mentality of art students who think they can change the world by spraying their hair silver.
They make me think of other obscenities. For instance: a Georg Jensen guillotine made from the finest silver and shaped with due concern for function and aesthetic appeal. Alternatively: condemned cells decorated with pretty blue bunny patterns from children’s nurseries.
In order to achieve these effects they have reduced profit by 6-5 per cent.
In here it is very quiet. No noise comes from the staff outside. I have seen them, huddled together in little groups at the windows
staring at Sergei. They seem anaesthetized. They have the glazed eyes of people too frightened to see anything that might get them into trouble. Thus they avoided Bart’s eyes. He pranced through like a spider, his hand on his gun, the fury in his veins bursting to fill the room like black ink in water.
Now in the silence of my office I see the extent to which he is afflicted by hurt and misunderstanding. Trying to talk to him, I put my hand on his arm. He flinches from me. In that terrible instant I am alone on the pack ice, the string inside me taut and all that lonely ice going in front of me no matter which way I turn. And he, Bart, looking at me guilty and afraid and angry and does he want to kill me?
Yes, he does.
He will learn to use his burning cat. He hates me because I killed his friend. It was a misunderstanding. It was his fault, not mine. If they hadn’t cheated I would never have made the mistake. His friend Sergei, the little turd, he thought he was clever but he was a fool. Sergei, his stupid mouth dribbling black blood on the top of the wire fence. If only his siphoning of funds had been more subtle. There were two other ways to do it, but he did it like a petty cash clerk. It was this which upset me the most. It was this which put me over the line and left me here, alone, threatened by the one person I thought my friend.
He may wish to kill me.
But I, alone on the ice, have eyes like the headlights of a truck. I have power. I will do anything. And I have made enough bad dreams that one more dying face will make not the slightest scrap of difference. Anyone who wants to cling on to their life won’t fuck around with me too willingly, though their hand might easily encircle my wrist, though they have the strength to crush me with their bare arms, for I am fearful and my fear makes me mighty.
And I am not mad, but rather I have opened the door you all keep locked with frightened bolts and little prayers. I am more like you than you know. You have not inspected the halls and attics. You haven’t got yourself grubby in the cellars. Instead you sit in the front room in worn blue jeans, reading about atrocities in the Sunday papers.
Now Bart will do as I wish for he wishes to live and is weak because of it. I am a freight train, black smoke curling back, thundering down the steel lines of terrible logic.
Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.
B
OOKS BY
P
ETER
C
AREY
PARROT AND OLIVER IN AMERICA
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
THEFT
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
30 DAYS IN SYDNEY: A WILDLY DISTORTED ACCOUNT
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
JACK MAGGS
THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH
THE BIG BAZOOHLEY
THE TAX INSPECTOR
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
BLISS
ILLYWHACKER
THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY
P
ETER
C
AREY
BLISS
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part
The Wizard of Oz
, part Dante’s
Inferno
, and part Australian
Book of the Dead
,
Bliss
is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76719-0
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy’s journey,
His Illegal Self
lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27649-0
ILLYWHACKER
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd,
Illywhacker
is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76790-9
JACK MAGGS
The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as these schemes converge, Maggs rises to the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76037-5
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s
My Life as a Fake
is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious piece of literature Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile—a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad.
My Life as a Fake
is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.
Fiction/978-1-4000-3088-0
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions from the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77750-2
THE TAX INSPECTOR
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbagful of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73598-4
THEFT
Michael “Butcher” Boone is an ex-“really famous” painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as a caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together, they’ve forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27648-3
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
To his pursuers, Ned Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief, and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief, Ned saw his first prison cell at fifteen and by the age of twenty-six had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72467-1
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, twelve-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime, and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, brightly lit back door. Funny, surprising, distinguished by its wonderfully nuanced portrait of a father and son thousands of miles from home,
Wrong About Japan
is a delight.
Travel/978-1-4000-7836-3
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Fat Man in History
, 978-0-679-74332-3
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com